Cutting back on nurse training means weakening the heart of any healthcare system. Yet this is exactly the direction in which the new Trump administration is moving, within a broader program of cuts to the health service and research funding. In the reform package there is also an intervention on nursing education: the Department of Education has decided to exclude nursing from the category of “professional degrees”, professional degrees which in the United States give access to more favorable conditions in student loans.

Trump cuts nurse training

In the United States, the “professional degree” is a very precise thing: it indicates not only the qualification necessary to practice a specific profession, but also an advanced level of competence, usually equivalent to a doctorate. In practice we are talking about paths that require at least six years of studies after graduation, often with two years of post-graduate training, and which are normally linked to a professional license. This category includes medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, law, clinical psychology, veterinary medicine, theology and other highly specialized areas. Nursing, however, remains outside.

It’s not a bureaucratic detail. In recent years, the nursing profession has increasingly focused on advanced courses – master’s degrees, doctorates in nursing practice (DNP), PhD in Nursing – which are essential for training teachers, researchers and key figures in the departments. Removing the status of “professional degree” from these courses means, quite simply, making them more difficult for thousands of students to afford.

The American Nurses Association called the decision “disconcerting,” warning that it risks undermining “the very foundations of patient care.” Olga Yakusheva, professor of nursing and health economics at Johns Hopkins University, is also clear: if the cost wall rises and loans are tightened, many young people will give up on advanced training. And fewer highly trained nurses means a more fragile health system. “If you limit access to university training for nurses – he recalled – you limit the entire healthcare system”.

The economic impact is not marginal. According to data from the American Nurses Association, today over 260 thousand students are enrolled in three-year degree courses in nursing and approximately 42 thousand in two-year courses. In the new “One Big Beautiful Bill” the subsidy program designed specifically to help graduate students and professionals cover their education expenses will be eliminated. Loans for parents of university students will also be limited. Translated: for low-income families, access to specialist training will become a luxury, not a right.

“Second-class” nurses: the mistake that weakens healthcare

But the devaluation of nurses is not just American. It’s a global trend. In Italy, recently, the president of the Senate Finance Commission, Massimo Garavaglia, proposed “making degree courses faster”, imagining a qualifying nursing high school that would allow you to work as a “nurse assistant” immediately after graduation. A shortcut that risks further disqualifying a profession already under pressure, pretending not to see that nursing today requires complex clinical skills, years of university study, internships, specializations, continuous training.

The paradox is evident: the healthcare world asks nurses for ever more responsibility, autonomy and skills, while politics – in many countries – pushes in the opposite direction, that of simplification and short-term savings.

In a historical moment in which public health needs more professionalism, more training and more research (we learned this the hard way during the pandemic), choices are made that go exactly in the opposite direction. It is a short-sightedness that does not only affect those who dream of being a nurse: it affects all of us, as patients, today and especially tomorrow.